American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)

The AFSC was formed in 1917 by a group of 14 socialist Quakers to aid draft resisters. AFSC has been penetrated and used by Communists since the early 1920s when it sent Jessica Smith, who later married Soviet spies Harold Ware and John Abt(since the 1950s CPUSA general counsel and a member of the CPUSA Political Committee) to the Soviet Union to determine famine relief needs in Russia exacerbated by civil war and the collectivization of farmland.

Since the 1960s, the AFSC has supported revolutionary terrorist groups such as the Vietcong, Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO), and the Central American Castroite groups. The theory behind AFSC's support of terrorist "national liberation movements" was outlined by Jim Bristol in a pamphlet published by AFSC in 1972 and continuously reprinted entitled "Non-violence: Not First for Export." Because AFSC's leadership role in organizing not only support for terrorist revolutionary groups, but in the past campaign to disarm America initiated through the USSR's covert action apparatus for political warfare, a closer look at AFSC's justification of violence is appropriate.

In the AFSC pamphlet, Bristol presents the totalitarian revolutionary goal in the most glowing terms as a utopia:

"a human society where the worth of the individual will be recognized and each person treated with respect....Land reform measures will be enacted....Education will be provided for every member of the society;....There will be employment for all. Discrimination because of race, colour or creed will end. Universal medical care will be provided." [If this all sounds strangely familiar, don't feel alone, these are all planks from the Communist Manifesto].

AFSC's pamphlet asserts that the United States and other Free World countries are guilty of a bizarre "terrorism" which it calls the "violence of the status quo" and irrationally defines this in the broadest possible terms not only as every possible social ill, but also personal or social discomfort. In the words of the pamphlet, this "violence of the status quo" is:

"the agony of millions who in varying degrees suffer hunger, poverty, ill-health, lack of education, non-acceptance by their fellow men. It is compounded of slights and insults, of rampant injustice, of exploitation, of police brutality, of a thousand indignities from dawn to dusk and through the night."

AFSC's pamphlet excuses terrorism in the following terms:

"terrorism...repeatedly...is used to signify violent action on the part of oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa, Latin America or within the black ghettos of America, as they take up the weapons of violence in a desperate effort to wrest for themselves the freedom and justice denied them by the systems that presently control their lives. "before we deplore terrorism, it is essential for us to recognize whose ‘terrorism’ came first....It is easy to recognize the violence of the revolutionary when he strikes out against the inequities and cruelties of the established order. What millions of middle-class and other non-poor fail to realize is that they are themselves accomplices each day in meeting[sic] out inhuman, all-pervading violence upon their fellows."

After this justification of the concept of class warfare, which makes "permissible" terrorist attacks on civilians since they are part of the "oppressive class," the AFSC pamphlet says that U.S. activists should not concern themselves with what sort of violent tactics revolutionaries utilize to achieve their ends. Instead, they should work to disarm the United States and for economic warfare against the U.S.’s "oppressive" allies. In its words:

"Instead of trying to devise non-violent strategy and tactics for revolutionaries in other lands, we will bend every effort to defuse militarism in our own land and to secure the withdrawal of American economic investment in oppressive regimes in other parts of the world."

The AFSC pamphlet concludes with a call for revolution in the United States, saying:

"Revolution then is needed first and foremost in the United States, thoroughgoing revolution, not a mild palliative."

The director of the AFSC’s Disarmament Program resurrected in the mid-1970s as a complement to the international disarmament campaign was Terry Provance, a World Peace Council(Soviet-controlled) activist and founding member of the U.S. Peace Council. Accompanied by two foreign Communist WPC activists, Nico Schouten, leader of the Netherlands "Ban the Neutron Bomb" organization, and East German Peace Council head Walter Rumpel, Provance addressed a Mobilization for Survival rally at the U.S. Capitol in October, 1979.

AFSC operates a lobbying arm, the Friends Committee on National Legislation(FCNL). Its focus and energies play a key role in developing strategy for pressure on Congress against the U.S. defense budget, and particularly against development or deployment of new weapons systems.

Another AFSC project, the National Action/Research on the Military/Intelligence Complex(NARMIC), served as the AFSC’s "intelligence-gathering arm." NARMIC works closely with the Institute for Policy Studies(IPS), the North American Congress on Latin America(NACLA), a pro-Cuba research group, and other anti-defense and armament research organizations.

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